In my on-going tributes to inspirational graduation speeches, I am writing about a column written by Chicago Tribune writer Mary Schmich. Okay, so this is cheating since it never became a speech though she said this is what she would have said if she had ever been invited. Baz Luhrman put it to music. This song pops up on the radio every so often after a big hit in 1999 when the shortened US version hit shore. I recommend to those curious to click on either link.

Everybody’s Free to Wear SunscreenDownload everybody_is_free_to_wear_sunscreen.mp3

Condell Park give a bit of history and the lyrics on the song at this link.

The sign of a world class CEO is that he/she has an infectious personality. The risk is that you get very homogenous board meetings. Well, it finally happened at FeedBurner this past Board Meeting on Halloween…

 

A friend recently invited me to the Morgan Stanley Mercedes Day at the Tracks. Mercedes supplied $5M worth of cars totaling 15,000 hp. The star car is their $450,000 SLR McLaren which was beast on the race track (0-60 in about 3.5 secs)…photo of yours truly in the drivers seat. I asked how many they were making of the "limited" release. Given the price tag, I would have assumed a couple hundred cars.

They are making 7,000. That’s right. They are planning on selling 7,000 $450,000 cars. Granted, it is an amazing car with the reintroduction of the classic Gullwing doors. And the Bubble inflates a little more…

"80% of success is just showing up."
— Woody Allen

Patience and resilience are core requirements for the entrepreneurial world. Often, it seems like an eternity as you wait for customer behavior to come around or for a market to take off. You do everything you can to keep the company afloat so that you don’t get taken out during the drought At some point, you begin to get up every morning wondering why you are doing this…the low salary, the fire drills and stress, the long hours and the frustration. And then, just when you’ve had enough, the market begins to come around. One customer buys, then another and another. Eventually, you are scaling rapidly and your issues turn to operational issues and efficiency.

This, unfortunately, is more the norm than the exception in the technology world. That said, persistence and "just showing up" each day can, in the end, result in nice win for you. I have often said that if your vision is right, it doesn’t mean your timing is (right product, wrong decade). Since you can’t control the latter, you have to keep your faith that eventually, the boat will turn.

One example of this is the photo service, Shutterfly. I did not even realize that they were still around post their initial battles with Ofoto (now Kodak Easyshare) and Snapfish (owned now by HP). The New York Times article, A Dot-Com Survivor’s Long Road, does a good job laying out this journey. When it went public recently, it re-affirmed my faith in the power of persistence and tenacity. Many a time, a company will start with big hopes, hit a series of challenges and disappear from the public scene only to re-appear several years later with a viable business model and scale.

Now, how you manage the long periods in the desert is more of a personal journey. Just remember that 80% is within your control…

In the previous post, I referred to "the starfish story". Here it is. A young boy and his grandfather were walking down the beach. It was a beautiful afternoon and the tide had pulled backed leaving hundreds of starfish stranded on the sand. The boy began to run around, picking up the starfish and throwing them back into the water. His grandfather laughed at his efforts and said "Jimmy, why do you run about so. There are hundreds of starfish and you are wasting your time. You can’t possibly make a different here."

His grandson stopped, looked carefully at the starfish in his hand and threw it back into the water. He said "Granddaddy, that may be the case for all of them, but I can make a difference for that one."

Isn’t that the reality of life. None of us will likely change the big picture. There will always be hunger, war, disfunctional families and illness. However, we can each impact those around us a person at a time (or a customer at a time…). When added up across all of us, the needle begins to move.

What if God was one of us
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on
the bus
Trying to make his way home
— Joan Osborne Song

It is very easy to get wrapped up in the challenges and tests of the day. In the venture business, unfortunately, approximately 50% of investments end up in the losing column and 10% of the deals drive the superior returns (hopefully). As a result, you spend over 80% of your time dealing with the issues in the portfolio such as fundraising, hiring management, revisiting strategy and costs and such. When things go wrong, they go wrong very quickly and one company can take up most of your waking hours (and many of the other ones as well). These are not enjoyable times. This, however, is not the focus of this post. Perspective is.

Today, I spoke with our building’s former landlord, Dave. He is a wonderful person who treated the building, its employees and its tenants like family. Our head maintenance guy, Pedro, recently had a stroke. I was not aware of the full extent of it, except that he was not coming back to work and Dave had set up a public fund for him. Today, however, I heard the full story.

Pedro is 52 and has lost the use of portions of his left side including his arm. He is working hard in rehab to regain use, but it is an uphill battle and it is not certain how much he will succeed. It is a struggle for him to walk, but he tries to get out for a mile each day with a walker. He has three young children and wife to support. However, it is uncertain if he will be able to work again. Social security disability pays some and he has some savings set aside, but this all will eventually run down.

Pedro was an everyday part of many of our lives in the building. When he had his stroke, it was out of sight, out of mind for many of us. Dave was one of the only people to reach out to help Pedro. This is true compassion and true leadership. This is what people mean when they say that their company and employees are like a family. It means you legitimately care and you spend time and effort to take care of each other.

It made me think about how many people are around me everyday and, because I am so focused on my daily grind, my most recent troubled situation, I don’t look up and I don’t take the time to care. I also fail to put things into perspective. Stories like Pedro’s make me realize how truly fortunate I am to have my family, my job, my opportunities and my friends. It also makes me think about how I could be using all of these more effectively for the betterment of those around me, even if it is just one person at a time (starfish story to come later).

I don’t know how Pedro will make it through his harsh reality. I will do what I can to help Dave in his efforts. However, given how much Dave is doing, it makes me understand how much more engaged and helpful I could be. Not only is Dave helping Pedro, he (and people like him) are setting a bar for the rest of us. It is up to all of us to lift up our heads from the rat race and rise to the challenge.

Quick follow-up. I just noticed that all of the anti-US footage in the post below has been removed. Whether you support the war or not, this is a bit surprising. This definitely puts Google into another censorship bind like with China. In this case, it is the US government applying the pressure, not China. This will continue to advance the debate over where the government should or shouldn’t censor content. While I don’t support airing this footage, I am even more concerned by this censorship…

"The first casualty when war comes is truth,"
— Senator Hiram Johnson

User generated content is obviously having an impact on all corners of life. I figured that it would just be a matter of time before user generated ads started hitting and, sure enough, we have three coming up in this year’s Super Bowl. I predict (always a no win) that next will be a company (perhaps Google/YouTube) that will create a platform for simple ad creation that bridges between the "creator" public and  corporations looking for innovative ideas. I don’t know how this would work but it will be coming (don’t know if it will be fad or permanent). Users could create copy, viewers could vote and corporations could use this filter to select innovative new ideas. Just a thought…

Where user generated content is really having an impact is in Citizen Journalism (no surprise). When Katrina hit, the first footage out was from the public. Recently, it has taken another turn…some would say for the better and others for the worse. Raw footage of Iraq has been steadily coming online (YouTube, etc) and the New York Times just did a piece on Anti-US Attack Videos Spread on the Web.

This has the government up in arms as well as those people supporting the war. The anti-war crowd sees this as a way to get graphic realities out to the public around the US spin machine. I personally find the videos shot by insurgents hunting our soldiers to be a bit too graphic for my tastes, but it does have the result of showing some of the brutal realities of the war there. What it really does is give the public unfettered access to a broad array of content and perspectives on the war. This is not what the Bush Administration wants or needs at this point. I wonder how  we, as a society, would have responded (and supported) WWI and WWII if graphic shots of trench warfare and beach landing scenes (like Finding Private Ryan) were scattered across a medium like the web back then?

This war is obviously much more controversial and the rationale for its genesis is not as universally supported. Just as opinion of the Vietnam war was shaped by the rise of color television, Iraq is being impacted by the internet. Ironic that the internet had its genesis with the Pentagon. I’m guessing they would have killed off the project if they had know that this would be the result…

I really feel sorry for this poor guy. He is getting absolutely roasted alive on the web. It was not the brightest move to do something this cocky and over the top, but his punishment is unbelievably severe. This is the dark side of the viral online video world. He created this video, allegedly, for a UBS interview. Somehow it leaked out and now has spread across all of Wall Street and much of America now. The New York Times even wrote this up "The Resume Mocked Round the World". I’d hate to see one of my kids have a lapse in judgement and have their career killed even before getting out of college. (see, even VC’s can be sensitive sometimes…)

Make it simple and make it work well. This is a product development mantra that I believe strongly in. Elon Musk, Michael Moritz and others are very product centric in their view of successful tech companies. If the product works well, people will not only use it but also virally recommend it to their friends. Pay Pal and eBay are two examples of this.

As you all may know, I am a big believer in the future of RSS. It is the future of the web. Consumers decide what they want and how they want it delivered to them. The web comes to you, you don’t go to the web. While RSS is already everywhere on the web (drives MyYahoo, built into Safari, etc), few people realize it. Firms have done a horrible job integrating RSS into daily online functions in a seamless, intuitive way. To add a feed to MyYahoo, your average user has to perform unnatural acts of contortion (find a feed you like and just try to figure out how to add it to your MyYahoo home page).

 

For RSS to benefit everyone, we have to do better as an industry in simplifying things.

Microsoft had a clean opportunity, with the release of IE 7 (beta), to change this. They have added a "feed subscription" button to the menu bar so users can go to a feed and simply click on the button to add the feed to their favorites. However, it simply gets dumped into the folder. I would have hoped that they would have built a reader (three pane option like Newsgator or Netnewswire) so that you could put the feeds into folders, folders would indicate how many new posts had hit each feed and, like email, you’d have three panes for folders, posts and preview of individual posts. But, no. It is dumped into the folder and gives you no indication of number of new posts, no previews, nothing…

Even worse, when you view a feed in IE 7, Microsoft strips off the original style page and slams their own style page on top of it. Unfortunately, in doing so, they strip off the links that a service like FeedBurner have there which allow you to subscribe using the reader of your choice and force you to only subscribe so you can read it in the IE 7 reader (which, oh yes, is horrendously lacking). Microsoft at its best.

I don’t care so much that the formatting has changed from my original design (let the reader chose what they like best). I do care that they try to force the reader to use IE 7 versus the reader of their own choosing which has all of their other subscriptions in it. The reader is dysfunctional, at best, and forces users to have subscriptions all over the place if they want to use IE 7 (unless they jump through hoops). Let me know if any of you who play in the RSS world are as disappointed as I am.